The nature of religions, why they cannot really be distinguished from culture and other ideological products, and what the political implications are, including regarding the “separation of church and State.”

3. Moscovici’s intellectual ‘age of innocence’ was also the age of uncertainties. Aware that his work did not fit into the current trends in social psychology, he tried not to overstep the expectations of his political and intellectual masters. After all, he was a ‘réfugié et apatride’ (refugee and stateless) until 1958 (Moscovici, 2019, p. 299). This, to my mind, may explain why he hesitated in adopting the idea of ‘cognitive polyphasia’, although throughout the whole of Psychoanalysis, he constantly referred to multifaceted forms of thinking and language.

In contrast to the generally adopted belief that Moscovici’s ancestor in the theory of social representations was Emile Durkheim, there is no evidence of that in the first edition of Psychoanalysis. Moscovici was aware of some of Durkheim’s work but his references to it were negligible.

Focusing on Moscovici’s historical, philosophical, and cultural resources, this chapter shows that, in his ‘age of intellectual innocence’, continental philosophy and anthropology, Marxism, and the psychology of Jean Piaget played a vital role in his development of the theory of social representations. I suggest that there is a remarkable similarity between Moscovici’s ideas and those of Ernst Cassirer, with whose work he was well acquainted.

Chapter 8 examines and partially defends Durkheim's functionalism as practiced in The Division of Labor in Society. His position is reconstructed with an eye to determining which aspects are worth retaining for a contemporary theory of social pathology, including the functionally organized nature of society. Focusing on claims regarding the moral function of the division of labor, it examines epistemological issues bound up with ascribing functions to features of society, including the relation between functional explanation and functional analysis and the role played by historical narratives. Durkheim's method is a complex holism whose claims depend less on single facts and individual arguments than on the plausibility of the whole picture that emerges from mutually reinforcing arguments, empirical facts, interpretive suggestions, and analogies. Thus, Durkheim's method for ascribing functions to social phenomena bears similarities to other interpretive enterprises, from the reading of texts to the construction of theories in the natural sciences.

This book examines the concept of social pathology as it figures in the thought of Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Marx, and Durkheim, demonstrating what it means to describe societies as "ill" and what the fact that we are so often drawn to conceiving of social problems as illnesses says about social ontology, or the kind of thing human society is. It explores the connections between social pathology and such phenomena as alienation, anomie, ideology, and social dysfunction and argues for the continuing relevance of the idea of "social sickness" for social critique. The aptness of the concept of social pathology in comprehending social ills points to important respects in which human societies are to be grasped as functionally-constituted, "living" beings and therefore as analogous to biological organisms, even if there are equally important respects in which the analogy does not hold, deriving primarily from the self-conscious and potentially free character of social activity. Human societies are understood as "spiritual" entities, the functions of which extend beyond material reproduction to include freedom, recognition, and self-transparency.

Chapter 9 explains Durkheim's understanding of moral facts and the conception of social solidarity at the core of his account of the division of labor's function in organized societies: crucial to what holds societies together and enables them to live are moral facts that inform relations among social members. Durkheim views human society as normatively constituted – governed by rules accepted as authoritative by social members – and claims that social institutions serve moral and not merely "useful" social functions. The chapter articulates the resources Durkheim has for conceiving of social pathology (itself an ethical phenomenon), examines the modern pathology most important to him, anomie, and coins a term for a related social pathology, hypernomie, a condition in which social rules are excessively rigid or constraining. Finally, the chapter reconstructs Durkheim's understanding of what is bad about social pathology – why social members should care whether their society is ill.

Chapter 10 reconstructs Durkheim's conception of sociology as a science of morality, which includes three tasks: orienting our conduct via an account of a morally healthy society; illuminating the connection between social functioning and morality (explaining why moral and social health are the same; and explaining why the moral ideals animating a given society do so and how they vary with changing social conditions. Durkheim's science of morality is similar to Marx's historical materialist account of morality, although the former leaves the moral authority of the rules it explains largely intact. While Durkheim's accounts of specific pathologies imply a critique of certain social rules, they do not discredit the fundamental norms at work in the societies he studies. The chapter concludes that Durkheim does not adequately explain how historically specific moral systems can claim a moral authority irreducible to the narrowly functional value they have for social reproduction.

Chapter 11 reconstructs Hegel's conception of objective spirit, which specifies the kind of being, or reality, characteristic of the social world and distinguishes it from other domains of reality, such as nature and subjective spirit (or mind). It begins by examining what objective spirit means for Vincent Descombes and, to a lesser extent, for Durkheim and John Searle. Four claims associated with Hegel's account of objective spirit are distinguished and defended: 1) there is a form of mindedness that exists outside the consciousness of individual social members; 2) externally existing mind, embodied in social institutions, is metaphysically prior to the minds of the individuals who live within those institutions; 3) social reality depends on a collective acceptance of its institutions' normative rules; and 4) such rules constrain what social members do but also expand their practical possibilities and hence enrich their agency

In this chapter, I trace the late-nineteenth-century sociological equivalent to the idea of tensional individuality, demonstrating that this notion formed part of early foundational reflections in the discipline. I do this by reconstructing the considerations of individuality of French sociologist Gabriel Tarde. On the one hand, Tarde promoted an image of the so-called ‘somnambulistic myself’, the notion that the individual is multiplicitous and that every person is constituted through the mimetic influences of others. On the other, Tarde maintained that this somnambulistic constitution of the individual co-exists with an anti-mimetic core: elements that persist despite external mimetic influence. What transpires out of this is, I posit, a conception of tensional individuality – one that, in contrast to the psychotherapy discussions detailed in Chapter 1, is then placed at the centre of early sociological thinking. The chapter identifies its relevance in a broader theoretical landscape stretching from fin-de-siècle philosophy to twentieth-century psychology. The chapter also discusses Tarde’s disputes with Emile Durkheim about the role and nature of sociology. I argue here that the supposed antagonism between Durkheim and Tarde is overblown and that the two found common ground on several important issues.

In this chapter I show that it is possible to identify across a range of different thinkers a shared analytical investment in collective behaviour that allows one to distil the notion of social avalanches or social avalanching. The fundamental claim I make is that Durkheim, Simmel, Tarde and many others sought to respond to an experience that gained particular prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: various forms of social change increasingly produced situations in which individuals felt the ground disappearing beneath them, carrying them away in a collective turbulence which, once set in motion, acquired its own self-organising properties. In addition to developing the notion of social avalanching from late-nineteenth-century social theory, this chapter explores the prosocial character of avalanches. Elaborating on the concept of social avalanching, I examine the extent to which a metaphor such as ‘avalanche’ merits inclusion in the realm of proper sociological concepts and connect it to discussions within physics about self-organised criticality. Finally, I discuss the notion of social avalanching in relation to social action as conceived in the sociology of Max Weber.